Author: Marshall Poe

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New Books in Native American Studies - Finis Dunaway. “Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice” (UNC Press, 2021)

In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contestation. 

In the award-winning book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, An Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press: 2021), Finis Dunaway explains how Indigenous people teamed up with the activist, photographer, and jazz drummer Lenny Kohm to build a grassroots movement to protect this sacred place from extractive industry. Using a humble photo slide show, Kohm and other activists, both Native people from the region and outsiders, marshaled the power of everyday people to convince critical and powerful actors that this was a place that deserved federal protection. While this fight is ongoing, Dunaway's book shows that sometimes power can be found in unexpected places, and that environmental history is not a simple story of decline and hopelessness.

Defending the Arctic Refuge website and teaching tools are here.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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NBN Book of the Day - Geert Lovink, “Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism” (Pluto Press, 2019)

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (Pluto Press, 2019) by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Brenden W. Rensink, “The North American West in the Twenty-First Century” (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.

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NBN Book of the Day - Heather Ford, “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” (MIT Press, 2022)

A close reading of Wikipedia's article on the Egyptian Revolution reveals the complexity inherent in establishing the facts of events as they occur and are relayed to audiences near and far.

Wikipedia bills itself as an encyclopedia built on neutrality, authority, and crowd-sourced consensus. Platforms like Google and digital assistants like Siri distribute Wikipedia's facts widely, further burnishing its veneer of impartiality. But as Heather Ford demonstrates in Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2022), the facts that appear on Wikipedia are often the result of protracted power struggles over how data are created and used, how history is written and by whom, and the very definition of facts in a digital age.

In Writing the Revolution, Ford looks critically at how the Wikipedia article about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution evolved over the course of a decade, both shaping and being shaped by the Revolution as it happened. When data are published in real time, they are subject to an intense battle over their meaning across multiple fronts. Ford answers key questions about how Wikipedia's so-called consensus is arrived at; who has the power to write dominant histories and which knowledges are actively rejected; how these battles play out across the chains of circulation in which data travel; and whether history is now written by algorithms.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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NBN Book of the Day - Tom McLeish, “The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art” (Oxford UP, 2021)

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.

Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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NBN Book of the Day - James D. Stein, “Seduced by Mathematics: The Enduring Fascination of Mathematics” (World Scientific, 2022) Math

Seduction is not just an end result, but a process -- and in mathematics, both the end results and the process by which those end results are achieved are often charming and elegant.This helps to explain why so many people -- not just those for whom math plays a key role in their day-to-day lives -- have found mathematics so seductive. Math is unique among all subjects in that it contains end results of amazing insight and power, and lines of reasoning that are clever, charming, and elegant. James D. Stein's Seduced by Mathematics: The Enduring Fascination of Mathematics (World Scientific, 2022) is a collection of those results and lines of reasoning that make us say, 'OMG, that's just amazing, ' -- because that's what mathematics is to those who love it. In addition, some of the stories about mathematical discoveries and the people who discovered them are every bit as fascinating as the discoveries themselves.

Seduced by Mathematics contains material capable of being appreciated by students in elementary school -- as well as some material that will probably be new to even the more mathematically sophisticated. Most of the book can be easily understood by those whose only math courses are algebra and geometry, and who may have missed the magic, enchantment, and wonder that is the special province of mathematics.

James D. Stein is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Cal State Long Beach.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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NBN Book of the Day - Ben Pitcher, “Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture” (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2022)

What does Prehistory mean to us now? In Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Ben Pitcher, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Westminster, uses cultural studies to explore both the human past and our contemporary life. The book examines how ideas of the prehistoric speak to contemporary anxieties, political projects, and even diets and food choices. Moreover, many of these versions of the past are the basis for regressive political projects that use Prehistory as part of racist and sexist agendas, agendas that need to be resisted and countered with the ideas discussed in the analysis. Engaging with a huge range of cultural and social theory, as well as examples from museums and heritage sites, archaeology, and even scientific hoaxes, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding the society today.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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NBN Book of the Day - Danielle Keats Citron, “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age” (Norton, 2022)

The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the 20th century. In the 21st, we have embraced a vast array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse. As Citron reveals, wherever we live, laws have failed miserably to keep up with corporate or individual violators, letting our privacy wash out with the technological tide. And the erosion of intimate privacy in particular, Citron argues, holds immense toxic power to transform our lives and our societies for the worse (and already has).

With vivid examples drawn from interviews with victims, activists and lawmakers from around the world, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (Norton, 2022) reveals the threat we face and argues urgently and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right. And, as a legal scholar and expert, Danielle Citron is the perfect person to show us the way to a happier, better protected future.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Previously, Jake has done some research in mixed reality, human-robot interaction, and AI ethics.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Cynthia Radding, “Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain” (U Arizona Press, 2022)

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life.

Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (U Arizona Press, 2022) foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.

Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to paint an expansive picture of Indigenous worlds before and during colonial encounters. She re-creates the Indigenous worlds in both their spiritual and material realms, bringing together the analytical dimension of scientific research and the wisdom of oral traditions in its exploration of different kinds of knowledge about the natural world.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

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NBN Book of the Day - Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism” (Princeton UP, 2022)

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism.

Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

The previous book by both authors is Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent paper is “Can the Rebel Body Function without its Visible Heads? The Role of Mid-Level Commanders in Peacebuilding.”

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